At a Winter's Fire
Page 8
II
Perhaps at first it had not been the least of the bitterness in M. DeJussac's cup of calamity that his mere pride of name must adjust itselfto its altered conditions. That the Vicomte De Jussac should have beenexpatriated because he declined when called upon to contribute hisheart's blood to the red conduit in the Faubourg St. Antoine wascertainly an infamy, but one of which the very essence was thatunquestioning acknowledgment of his rank. That the land of his adoptionshould have dubbed him Mr. Jussuks--in stolid unconsciousness, too, ofthe solecism--was an outrage of a totally different order--an outrageonly to be condoned on the score that an impenetrable insular_gaucherie_, and not a malicious impertinence, was responsible for it.
Mr. Jussuks had, however, outlived his sense of the injuriousappellation; had outlived much prejudice, the wear of poverty, his memoryof many things, and, very early, his scorn of the plebeian processes thatto the impecunious are a condition of living at all. He was certainly aman of courageous independence, inasmuch as from the hour of his settingfoot in England--and that was at the outset of the century--he hadcontrolled his own little fortunes without a hand to help him over thedeep places.
Of his first struggles little is known but this--that for years, turningto account some small knowledge of draughtsmanship he had acquired, hefound employment in ladies' academies, of which there was a plenitude atthat date in King's Cobb.
That, however, which brought him eventually into a modest prominence--notonly in that same beautiful but indifferently known watering-place (uponwhich he had happened, it would appear, fortuitously), but elsewhere andamongst men of a certain mark--was a discovery--or the practicalapplication of one--which in its result procured him a definite object inlife, together with the means to pursue it.
Ammonites, and such small geological fry, were to be found by thethousand in the petrified mud beds of the Cobb region; but it was left tothe ingenuity, aided by good fortune, of the foreigner to unearth fromthe flaking and perishing cliffs of lias some of the earliest and finestspecimens of the ichthyo- and plesio-saurus that a past world has yieldedto the naturalists.
Out of these the _emigre_ made money, and so was enabled to pursue andenlarge upon his researches. Presently he prospered into a competence,married (poor Mademoiselle Belleville, of the Silver Street Academy, whodied of typhoid at the end of a couple of summers), and so grew into thekindly old age of the absorbed and gentle naturalist, with his Plancinebudding at his side.
What in all these fifty years had he forgotten? His name, his rank, hisvery origin? Much, no doubt. But that there was one haunting memory thathad dwelt with him throughout, his child and her lover were to learn--onememory, and that dreadful recurring illusion of the guillotine.
"When Black Venn slips his apron, I shall be in a position to consideryour suit."
Surely that was an odd and enigmatical condition, entirely remote fromthe subject at issue? Yet from the moment of the first impassionedpleadings of the stricken George, De Jussac had insisted upon it as onefrom which there should be no appeal.
Now the Black Venn referred to was a great mound of lias that rolled upand inland, in the far sweep of the bay, from the giddy margin of thelower ruin of cliffs. These--mere compressed mountains of mud, blown bythe winds and battered by the sea--were in a constant state of yawn andcollapse. Yard by yard they yielded to the scourge of Time, andlandslides were of common occurrence.
All along the middle slope of Black Venn itself, a wide, deep fissure,dark and impenetrable, had stretched from ages unrecorded. But theeventual opening-out of this crevasse, and the consequent subsidence ofthe incline, or apron, below it, had been foretold by Mr. De Jussac; andthis, in fact, was the condition to which he had alluded.